Databases for the Symbolics

["Daniel L. Weinreb" <DLW@alderaan.scrc.symbolics.com>]

    Date: Fri, 27 May 88 05:08 EDT
    From:     barmar@Think.COM (Barry Margolin)

    Since it is an extra-charge product, does that mean that you aren't
    going to reimplement the namespace database using Statice?

That's right, we aren't.  In order to do that, we'd have to make Statice
part of the bundled Genera system.  Originally, that's what we had in
mind.  However, we later realized that making the namespace database use
Statice would mean that we'd have to REQUIRE every site to run Statice,
which means every site would need to have a Statice file system.  For
many sites, this would mean that two different backup systems would have
to be in service, simultaneously.  Also, each site would have to provide
disk space on one of their Symbolics machines to hold the Statice
databases, and some sites are very short on disk space.  Assessing all
this sort of thing, we decided that having Statice as a mandatory part
of a regular Statice release would cause a tremendous amount of trouble,
and result in lots of angry users.  We considered various strategies,
but decided none of them would really solve the problems, for various
reasons.  We were forced to this conclusion based on our previous
experience with software releases, and I assure you we were disappointed
for just the same reason.  (There are a lot of other things in the
system that I would love to convert to use Statice databases; the
namespace is the prime example, but there are several others.)